If you want to be a posh bureaucrat and have the option to exercise the profile of an intellectual, then become a university professor.
I am no longer sure which direction I was headed in when I started my PhD. I definitely didn’t have in mind what I actually do. I definitely knew I’d be teaching at a university, which is thankfully one of the things I do. I also expected that I would become something between a researcher and a scientist, an intellectual maybe. Someone that would be in a position to engage in public speaking, after carefully studying different research topics. Someone who would be useful to policy makers and would offer scientifically backed evidence to their conclusions and recommendations.
While teaching is still a good part of our everyday work life, research time is being marginalized more and more at the expense of time and energy – wasteful bureaucracy. You see, even in bureaucracy, one can still differentiate between the good, the bad and the ugly.
There are several bureaucratic processes (a small fraction of the total number of things we do) that contribute to enhancing the quality and the outcomes of what we do. An example of such bureaucracy is university accreditation. Accreditation is a process during which an independent entity or authority checks the different aspects of a university curriculum (undergrad or postgrad) and decides whether that program fulfills certain requirements or other criteria. The process doesn’t stop there. It becomes a lot more constructive by having as output a detailed report which offers the program/department/university a series of recommendations which need to be considered if the program is to be improved. This is an example where academics invest time but the outcome of which is constructive and serves to the benefit of all stakeholders involved: students, faculty, staff, university management, community etc.
The bad bureaucracy includes processes which take a lot of time and effort, require tons of paperwork, stamps, signatures, formal meetings etc, which even though they need to be simplified and expedited must be in place in order for the laws to be enforced and the checks and balances to be in place. For example, even though department meetings can sometimes last for hours and entail tons of arguments and frustration, they are necessary for the purposes of a democratic and transparent decision-making process.
In addition to the above, there are situations where not only lots of time and energy are invested (or, even better, wasted) but the outcomes of those processes do not come with added value to the individual(s) involved or the system as a whole. That is, it is a cost without a(n) (obvious) benefit.
In 2024, a large fraction of the necessary bureaucratic processes ran by academic institutions still come with a paper trail! Every single incoming and outgoing letter needs to be printed out, numbered and be filed in a physical folder. Our admin staff still go to the post office and send out the original papers to the main campus, while there is still no way to digitally file everything!
I myself, as a chair of a department, have to carry out hundreds of tasks which are not part of my job description and without which, in effect, no process can be completed. Such tasks entail tons of diplomatic conversations among faculty members and staff regarding issues including – but not limited to – internet access, heating in the faculty offices, cutting the grass in the precincts of the establishment, as well as cleaning, among other things. For each of these otherwise meaningless problems, I have to make numerous phone calls, write emails, ask favors, secure budget and run a final check after the respective tasks have been completed. Once I am done with all the above, I have to waste another handful of workdays in order to repeat all the tasks that have already been done, but the ministry forgot to send us the correct template before the deadline. So, now, the work that we already did needs to be repeated in order to fulfill some bureaucratic requirement that some individual sitting in some office didn’t think of sending earlier.
And while I am on the phone begging friends or local authorities to cut the grass and remove the trash from the backyard, I walk back to the classroom to finish my microeconomics lecture. In those 30 seconds I am still thinking that I once was a young dreamer who used to get lost under piles of research papers and forgot to eat while surviving on coffee. And I am still dreaming that some minister will finally have the courage to ask us, the academics, to get back to the real stuff, instead of exhausting our time and knowledge on nonsense.
Marina Selini Katsaiti is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Economic and Regional Development at the Agricultural University of Athens in Amfissa.